Supreme Court blocks some of Arizona proof-of-citizenship requirements for November election

By Tierney Sneed and John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to revive parts of a Republican-backed Arizona law that could have barred thousands of voters from casting a ballot in the November presidential contest or voting by mail, but it permitted other controversial requirements of that law to take effect.

The Supreme Court left in place a lower court’s ruling that barred enforcement of the law that required voters to document their US citizenship to vote in this year’s presidential election, but it allowed the state to enforce a requirement that would-be voters document their citizenship before registering to vote using a state registration form.

In a partial win for Republicans, in other words, proof of citizenship will be required for new voters in some circumstances. Voters who cannot document their citizenship status will still be allowed to register using a federal form.

Arizona is a critically important battleground in this year’s presidential election. Joe Biden carried the state by just over 10,000 votes in 2020. Donald Trump won it in 2016.

The case is likely to be the first of many election-related disputes the Supreme Court will be asked to tackle on an emergency basis this year. The Republican National Committee, joined by state GOP lawmakers who supported the law, had asked the high court to step into the clash over election rules in the state in a case that elevated non-citizen voting, an issue Republicans have tried to put front and center in this year’s campaign. 

The Supreme Court handed down the decision in a short order without explanation, which is common for emergency appeals.

Three conservatives — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — said they would have allowed more of the state’s proof-of-citizenship requirements to take effect, barring currently registered voters from casting a presidential ballot. Four others — liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett — would have kept the all the contested provisions of the law on hold.

Arizonans may register to vote with a state form or a federal form. Under the previous system, residents using either form would be permitted to vote only in federal elections if they declined to submit proof of citizenship or had not already done so with the state’s motor vehicles division.

But in 2022, responding to false claims that widespread immigrant voting affected the outcome of elections, state lawmakers enacted several new requirements. The new laws prohibited voters who had not submitted proof of citizenship from casting a presidential ballot or voting by mail, regardless of which form they used. Going forward, the state legislature barred election officials from accepting any state voter registration form unless that documentation was submitted.

A US District judge blocked some requirements in the law last year. A three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reverse that decision this month.

Arizona’s top election official, Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, warned that reviving the requirements as the November election approached would confuse voters while creating “undue hardship” for him and county election administrators.

“My concern is that changes to the process should not occur this close to an election, it creates confusion for voters,” Fontes said in a statement.

Bruce Spiva, senior vice president at the Campaign Legal Center, which represented several of the voting rights groups, said that the court’s order upended “longstanding rules on the eve of an election that will clearly cause voter confusion.”

“Free and fair elections rely on every citizen being able to cast a ballot and the fight is far from over,” Spiva added.

The 2022 law had been challenged by tribal and civil rights groups as well as by the Biden administration. The Democratic National Committee and state Democratic Party joined the groups in arguing that the provisions in question should be frozen for the 2024 election.

Democrats argued that if the Supreme Court revived the requirements it would disenfranchise voters who lacked access to the documents, including in cases where voters had already documented their citizenship with other state agencies. Older voters often lack access to documents like birth certificates that would prove their citizenship, they said. Critics of the law also said it would disproportionately affect Native Americans.

Democrats argued that barring Arizonans who had already voted for president in the primary from casting a ballot in the general election would sow “chaos and confusion,” and they had asked the high court to rely on a legal doctrine known as the Purcell principle, which the justices sometimes invoke to stay out of last-minute election lawsuits. But the court did not mention that doctrine in its brief order.

“What’s especially surprising about the ruling is the absence of any reference to Purcell — the doctrine the justices usually rely upon to justify keeping federal courts out of contentious ballot disputes as elections draw near,” said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

“The Court likes to insist on limiting confusion when it comes to these kinds of rulings — and yet here we have three different lineups voting for three different results. If nothing else, that will only reinforce critiques that the justices invoke Purcell selectively.”

In 2013, the Supreme Court limited when states may require proof of citizenship for individuals who signed up using the federal form. The high court concluded then that, under the National Voter Registration Act, states could not prevent voters lacking those documents from casting ballots in federal elections as long as the federal form did not include the mandate.

But Republicans countered that Congress did not have the authority to set the rules for states’ vote-by-mail systems, nor did Congress have the power to regulate states’ voter registration rules for presidential elections.

Arizona may — and does already — require voters to document their citizenship to vote in state and local elections.

Also at issue in the case was a 2018 consent decree arising from a separate lawsuit. The consent decree set up a fail-safe system for individuals lacking documentary proof of citizenship — a system that was eliminated by the 2022 law.

Under the decree, when processing those voter registrations, local election officials were required to look to the state’s DMV database for any records confirming the individual’s citizenship. If such records existed, the individual was fully registered. If not, the individual was not registered for state elections but was allowed to vote for federal office.

According to the statistics from the Arizona Secretary of State, more than 40,000 voters had already been barred from voting in state and local elections because of lack of documents proving their citizenship.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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